A Mamá No la Vas a Llevar en la Maleta: Undocumented Mothers Crossing and Contesting Borders for Their Children’s Education

Abstract

This paper illuminates the border-crossing and border-contesting work of undocumented mothers seeking opportunities for their children. Mothers navigate dual threats of deportability and povertyinduced mobility, preparing children for, and utilizing schools to stave off, these possibilities. Examining border crossing as parent involvement, I introduce "bordermothering" to elucidate the paradoxical ways in which mothers defy gendered norms of embodied parenting to provide for their children and invoke these norms to contest the conditions that compel their defiance. [Borders, Latina, Mothers, parent involvement, undocumented parents] El ensayo presente ilumina el trabajo de madres indocumentadas al cruzar y desafiar fronteras en la búsqueda de oportunidades educacionales para sus hijos. Las madres navegan la doble amenaza de la deportación y la movilidad forzada por causa de la pobreza, preparando así a sus hijos para estas posiblidades y utilizando los sistemas escolares como herramienta de resistencia frente a tales amenazas.The title of this article "a mamá no la vas a llevar en la maleta," [you're not going to bring mom in your suitcase], emerged from Angelica, 1 an undocumented Mexican mother, in her description of how she used homework to teach her son, Memo, independence and self-sufficiency. For Angelica, the prospect of physical separation was an inevitable factsomething for which her son had to be ready. The larger quote reads:A vez tiene mucho tarea, yo entiendo pero el, el lo hace porque yo, yo le digo, mira mihijo, un día … no voy a estar contigo, y tu vas a tener que aprender, para que tu salgas adelante donde estés...y a mamá no la vas a llevar en la maleta. [Sometimes he has a lot of homework, and I understand but he, he does it because I tell him, look honey, one day we won't, I won't be with you, and you're going to have to learn, so that you can get ahead of where you are…and you can't take mom in your suitcase.] Memo's mother, making the case that deportation was arbitrary and cruel, an institution that had no respect for behaviors she identified as "good" (i.e. caring for children), taught Memo to utilize school as a means of learning to survive and thrive in a capricious world-one in which they were certain to be separated.Both the reality and the threat of separation were defining features in the involvement of Angelica and Lupe, two undocumented mothers, in their children's education. For both Angelica and Lupe, being a "good mother" entailed defying models of white bourgeoise womanhood (Lugones 2008) that suture women's bodies to feminized spaces such as home and school-a form of embodiment that has never been accessible to poor women or women of color in opposition to whose laboring bodies "good" woman and motherhood are defined (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2009). Rather, investing in their children's education, being an involved parent, entailed a series of "Faustian bargains" (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001) as they navigated multiple borders-national, gender, class, neighborhood-crossing...

Multidirectional carework across borders: Latina immigrant women negotiating motherhood and daughterhood

“…We build on scholarship that situates immigrant motherhood as a source of empowerment. For instance, Latina immigrant women feel pride when their labor provides educational opportunities for their children and agency in protecting their children from the harms of an anti‐immigrant regime, even when their efforts require difficult conversations about deportation and family separation (Alexander, 2018; Rendón García, 2019). By demonstrating how women value the carework they provide to their children and mothers both “here” and “there,” we argue that these efforts to maintain family relationships across borders are a form of agency in the face of immigration laws that keep them physically apart.…”